Curation in Drupal: 1,000 Ways to Skin a Cat

A discussion of different techniques for curating content is long overdue in the Drupal community.

I have been on many Drupal projects that required a tremendous amount of curation by the editorial staff.  Views and Panels and Context and all sorts of things end up getting used here.  Nodequeues and custom code and all manner of techniques go into helping Drupal to become a curation tool instead of just a content management tool.

Requirements for curation projects can seem as if they vary widely from project to project, but by breaking the main components of curating web content down to a few basic principles, we find that curation is a problem we can solve for the entire Drupal community if we talk through the needs of curators.

Sometimes content managers, writers and curators are all the same person, but not always.  However, even in the case where they are the same person, I would argue that when a writer puts on their curator hat, they are doing a different job altogether.

I have worked on curation editorial systems using Drupal with organizations from Pharmacuetical companies like Novartis and Pfizer to media companies like Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting and even the US Federal government.  No two projects handle curation the same way and all of them have trouble keeping users of curation tools happy.

I would like to share my experiences with different methods of making content curatable in Drupal using different methods.  I would also like to propose a simple solution that is very rarely even proposed in most curation discussions.  In fact, I would argue that curation is not discussed enough in projects of all sizes when an editorial tool is planned.

I would like to discuss the following subjects in Barcelona.

• Curation in Drupal out of the box
• Views, Panels, Ctools and Context as curation tools
• Basic Features of a good curation tool in Drupal
• "The Tout Concept" and why it is important to content type and technical design
• Previewing curation changes
• Curation as content vs Curation as Config
• Finally, I would like to discuss a new module called curation, that I have been working on with other community members that would provide a new toolset for providing curators what they need in Drupal with much less development and site building effort than currently required.